Performing a task on a computing apparatus often involves generating, duplicating, modifying, transmitting, or performing other tasks on numerous digital items. In an example, an individual may wish to retrieve a photograph from a digital camera, make modifications to such photograph, transmit the photograph to a separate computing device, and thereafter email the photograph to an acquaintance. Thus, the individual may initially download the photograph from the web page, generate a copy of such photograph and place it in a different folder, access the photograph, modify the photograph, place the photograph on a portable flash drive, insert that flash drive into a laptop computing apparatus, attach the modified photograph to an email, and thereafter cause the email to be transmitted to an identified acquaintance of the individual. A few weeks or months later, the same individual may wish to email the same file to another acquaintance, but is unsure of which version is the version that was previously emailed and where that version is located. Furthermore, the individual may forget that he or she emailed the photograph in the first place. Accordingly, it can be ascertained that managing relationships between digital items on a computing apparatus is a complicated task, especially when performed manually by an individual or based upon memory of the individual.
Compounding the problem of file management is the ever increasing storage that is available on modern computing devices, and the continuously decreasing cost of such storage. Because of this massive amount of data storage capacity, people have little incentive to delete or archive data. The practical cost of maintaining various copies and versions of different digital items across multiple folders and devices, however, may be relatively high. That is, an ability of an individual to find a particular file, or relationships between such files, is compromised due to the digital clutter that is created by maintaining all of such different types of digital items in various locations. Conventionally, individuals must meticulously maintain a manually created file organization system so that they can efficiently locate digital items and understand relationships between the digital items (e.g., files grouped together in a folder are in some way related). These human-generated file organization systems, however, often break down under massive amounts of data, and individuals often do not strictly comply with their own organization systems. Furthermore, users are often limited to a hierarchical organizational model that embodies only one way of organizing data, and are not necessarily appropriate for all user purposes.
Modern file management systems have been configured to help individuals locate particular digital items by maintaining various types of searchable metadata about the digital items including name, location, creation/modification date, etc. For instance, when looking for a most recent version of a file, an individual may search for the file by entering a term in the title of the file or in the contents of the file, and the results can be sorted by modification date, creation date, etc. This approach, however, is subject to failure if a system depends on human consistency in encoding versions into file names, co-locating related files in a folder hierarchy, or remembering a fragment of text that is guaranteed, when utilized to perform a search, to return a most recent version of a file without returning too many files. Deliberate or inadvertent user action can result in files being moved, renamed, or modified in ways that can easily cause these search and organization strategies to fail. Additionally, conventional file management systems are generally restricted to a personal computer of a user, and are currently not configured to help organize digital items that are not resident upon the personal computer. The problem with respect to management of digital items, however, is not restricted to a personal computer, and can span typical physical devices (which may be more than one device) and items sent off of a computer device (e.g., visits to web pages, items emailed out of a personal computer, . . . ).